SpaghettiCat

Clearly VW engaged in deception of the customer as they cheated their test results. Customers are protected from such deception by the law.

My point was to criticise the "Internet Dream" utopian fairy tale advocated by commenter TEMPORAL--where a user gets everything but pays nothing--and to explain that the internet's commercialisation is perfectly OK.

That's where the government intervenes by legislating, thereby society is protecting individuals from themselves (and from harming others).

I don't see how there is a need to do this with the internet in the way the "Internet Dream" describes it.

> The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back.

These are not the only players in the game like you believe. Those who advertise more effectively on the web have more of an advantage over those who advertise via other media and those who don't advertise at all. And, as ads are more spammy and in-your-face, the advertised products get bought more whether all competitors are spamming or only some. Advertised products are bought more than they would be if the ads were mild or there were no ads at all.

PS: Thanks for the blog link it looks very interesting, I'll read it later.

> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.

What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they don't have to use it. Ultimately, the decision is up to the consumer for what is the for them.

It's not an editor, it's an IDE. Just look at the Python support they expect to add next year: "full intellisense, debugging, profiling, pkg mgmt, unit test, virtual env, multiple interpreter, Jupyter, etc. support.". All that in one program? You can't tell me that's not an IDE.

The problem with naming things "what they are" is that the scope of the project can change over the years, so that the name selected 5 years ago doesn't appropriately reflect what the project does now.

The good they've done is fill the demand of 1/6 of the world's population who use the site.

> So far the data seems to indicate that internet.org is comparable to releasing swarms of burrowing parasites upon the poorest of the world.

Haven't a clue what you mean by this analogy.

Stupidest title I've seen in a while. I thought there would be underground beaches and carnivals.

And there have been at least as many cases of political abuse of the police force, should we also cut down on that just because there is a potential for abuse? Many instutions that are intended to good can be abused or used as political weapons under a totallitarian government, but I think the potential for abuse is much reduced under a more benevolent political system.

> Your very insistence that you have the only right point of view on this makes me even more against ever allowing anybody who thinks like you the power to involuntarily commit anybody.

I don't know what made you think that I have the only right opinion. I'm advocating a view, and actually part of developing a well-rounded view is challenging beliefs you yourself hold--playing devil's advocate.

> That they can only be deprived of their rights through due process of law, as passed by elected legislature. Not a "scientific" book written by people who have no accountability to the population as a whole.

The part of the government that deals with health sets the policy on who should be institutionalised, and they are the ones that give executive power to do so to doctors. Actually, doctors and psychiatrists hold an immense amount of responsibility over the welfare of patients; they may not personally hold accountability, but the hospital or other medical instution does, because of the great potential for lawsuits in the case of mistakes (AFAIK).

> It may well already be true that a malicious individual with enough knowledge could look at your current lifestyle and find a justification for committing you and injecting you with things against your will. I'm sure that such a thing could happen under the rules that you seem to advocate.

This is rather unplausible; there is a mountain of a difference between my behaviour and of an unwashed, malnourished man who fails to communicate even basically with other people, standing for hours at road crossrods like a zombie.

> Which people? "Mentally ill" people aren't a homogenous group, and the fact that someone is mentally ill and living on the street does not imply that they are incompetent to make personal decisions due to their mental illness. The relation between mental illness, poverty, physical illness, etc. is complex.

I was referring to patients who lack control over their mental faculties at least to the degree of the man on which the article was written.

> There aren't simple answers, and this person isn't these people.

Yes, this person belongs to the general collective I described above. Clearly when I said "these people" I meant people like the man in the article I was talking about.

> Or was he, as he seemed, competent -- but voluntarily decided to discontinue the medication?

He may have been in the driving seat when he hypothetically decided to stop taking medication, but ultimately he lost control of the wheel. If a person is not taking care of themself and so out of your wits that you stand for hours at road junctions staring blankly forward, they need to be saved. The authorities must assume that though the decision to stop taking medication was voluntary, because the person lost control of their mind, maybe that person's decision was misinformed (or as you suggest, accidental). By analogy, ust because the driver of a car intentionally didn't buckle themselves in (maybe they wanted to die, or like the risk, or were just eccentric), doesn't mean that when they crash and their body flies out, that we shouldn't hospitalise them.

> And that's great, but its a mistake to project what you think you would want onto other people as their preferences.

Actually there is no mistake here: it's a fact that there are other people like me who want this protection from the state.

By "crazy action" I mean for 2 years wilfully undereating, not washing, living in filth, not responding to basic communication (even to your own daughter) and standing for long stretches of time at road intersections.

>And under what mental disorder should someone be institutionalised?

Under those that are responsible for causing a person to suffer and damage their own health and fail to try to recover, or seek help with recovery, as in the example above.

>All you've referred to is the DSM, so it's very unclear which illnesses and disorders you are referring to.

You've taken this comment thread on a totally different tangent. We're arguing a wholly different point now.

> Incidentally, are you aware that there is a difference between a mental disorder and a mental illness?

No, wasn't aware. I use them interchangeably.

This already happens with homeless people: they become diseased, malnourished, get drunk and hurt themselves. Once the trauma has reached a certain degree that they require hospitalisation, they end up in hospital and released once they've recovered. Are you proposing we not help them at all and just let them fester and die on the streets?

Surely not. The "revolving door" concept, as you call it, is the middle-ground between not helping at all, thus letting a mentally ill person reach trauma more severe, and permanently confining those with incurable mental disorders (but those which can be controlled, and the patient able to live healthily outside the ward), which is both wildly expensive and harder to justify overruling the patient's will and freedom.